Does Grand Theft Auto V Have a Good Story?

Video Statistics and Information

Video
Captions Word Cloud
Reddit Comments
Captions
there's one debate that i feel like every group of gamer friends has had at one point or another does grand theft auto 5 have a good story for the longest time i thought no but then i was randomly watching interviews from the actors and i heard ned luke the actor for michael say this your agent can view the video game you're like no i don't want to do a video game what changed i saw the material and you know it was a it's a brilliant script you know these guys are these guys are unbelievable who who write this stuff i mean they're so prolific they're so funny and they're so pointed you know and you know you just read the material and it's and you go i'm in and i thought well geez i haven't played the game since i was a dumb stoner who thought he knew everything maybe it's time i replay it at the time of writing i haven't played the game in about four years and as i said i was mostly blazed for both of my playthroughs but let me go ahead and tell you what i remember these opinions are probably all wrong so save your comments for the end of the video anyways i remember loving the characters i mean i've met plenty of people who say that each of the three protagonists is their favorite and they've all given me totally legitimate reasons why i remember the game making michael look like a huge hypocrite or maybe just a [ __ ] it seemed like the whole plot was just michael saying alright one last job then i'm out of the game for good over and over again when he really didn't need the money i remember franklin as this kid who wanted to progress in life but wound up looking up to the wrong people ultimately earning himself nothing but an expensive and empty home and i remember trevor as this character who learns that he can't compete with the way that crime and business has done nowadays he just doesn't have the heart for all the business and politics he's too loyal and that just doesn't fly nowadays i also remember only one of the three endings making any sense or being fitting at all my big issue here again having not played the game in four years is that none of these characters really got a happy ending except for michael who probably deserves it the least all he did was break his best friend's heart and lock a 20 year old into a life of crime maybe that's completely wrong though we'll know soon enough my other big issue is that i remember the game just having so many unmemorable villains i can't even remember all their names i just remember all these guys just being jerks that keep on replacing each other like the plot can't keep focused on any of them long enough to establish a nuanced character you might say oh that's the point it's so that we can focus on the three protagonists well then why even have these characters in the first place if they all have the exact same personality all that we can learn from them is that our protagonists don't like [ __ ] which you know they don't really like anybody so that's kind of a moot point again though i remember mostly loving the dynamic between these three characters for the most part i thought their story arcs were well developed and that they played into each other in a really effective way oh and the satire i remember absolutely hating parts of it and absolutely loving others so we'll see how that turns out all of this kind of pales in comparison to my biggest point i remember not feeling like there was any big moral to the story i know this sounds like middle school english teacher talk but if a story doesn't have a message to share then it's hard for me to imagine it being written with any real purpose beyond just shut your brain off and have fun which yeah that's kind of fitting for grand theft auto but that totally isn't how i felt about san andreas which might still be my favorite entry in the series there were a ton of times when it seemed like the game was trying to develop a message in consistent themes but maybe it just had too many writers with too many differing goals because ultimately it felt to a younger stoned me that this game was a cloud of ideas rather than a single vision again though most of those takes are probably just wrong that's just how the old stoned and stupid me felt let's replay it thoughts unclouded and see if there's something really special here that i've been missing see you in a few days while that was definitely an enlightening couple of days before we get into just what i learned a quick word from today's sponsor raid shadow legends no i'm just kidding it's nordvpn which you can grab using the link in the description this essay spends a good bit of time talking about the way a lot of people have sort of been lulled into this way of thinking where their privacy and their personal lives mean nothing to them so i've gotta ask have you ever had one of those moments where during a conversation you go to google something and the first suggestion is exactly what you wanted to search that's incredibly creepy and it's stuff like that that's got me in this paranoid state where i cover up my phone camera every time i'm on the toilet or whatever a vpn like nord is an important first step to taking back your privacy basically advertising agencies want to know everything about you and so they buy all sorts of your data from the different services you use if this sort of stuff well horrifies you as much as it does me and you value your privacy and don't want to live in the world of blade runner then picking up nordvpn is a pretty good first step assuming you don't want to just jump straight into the tinfoil hats and hey as i'm sure you know you can also use nordvpn to watch region lock content if you want to stick it to the man even harder to sign up for a two-year plan at a pretty fat discount and get an extra month for free check out nordvpn in the description or use the code led at checkout back to the video well that was a long two days i sure as hell would have liked to let it breathe and taken more time on my playthrough but well i gotta make a video this week so after rereading the previous two pages of the script some of my opinions haven't changed but a lot have completely flipped nowhere better to start than the beginning first things first this game's got some serious charm having only played online for the last four years or so i totally forgot about the insane detail of the single player mode animals are walking around city streets are absolutely crammed with people and cars npcs have way better ai i'm not getting stupid phone calls every five minutes i swear even the sunsets look better in single player i'll be honest i was not looking forward to replaying this thing but the minute i heard that opening saxophone and welcome to los santos and saw that awesome richly detailed beachfront which had been replaced by an empty shell of itself by online mode i couldn't keep the smile off my face even if the story turned out to be pure crap i knew i was set for yet another good time with this game then when michael saw this drunk bum tripping over a piece of trash and just said i know just how you feel it was time to whip out the notepad see i remembered something about franklin learning that money doesn't equal happiness by the end and that line coming from the rich michael was where i started my desperate search for that thing i always felt the story was missing a message or at least something to make you think well on that note the game spends the next few minutes establishing franklin's character in the situation he's in he's this low down punk doing some really sketchy work for a guy he ate with a partner he loathed to call his friend and more than anything else in the world franklin wants to get out of that a pretty typical setup for your protagonist in the first act here's the issue though franklin's friend lamar makes it pretty clear that he represents what franklin wants to leave behind the past see lamar is perfectly happy flipping drugs getting shot at and not making any serious progress in the real world that's how [ __ ] work ain't it you do some jobs for food develop a little uneasy relationship and then they ask you to do something above and beyond you fall out fools get capped and then you start all over again with some other food to him it's all about one thing earning the respect of his friends and the people he calls family franklin being one of them lamar would rather sell coke and pay a tithe to some so-called ogs than get a real job because that's just how you fit in with this underworld community that he calls his family we all big homies but he bigger right exactly man that's some [ __ ] pyramid scheme [ __ ] pyramids is good man illuminati pharaoh [ __ ] is all of this character development dropped on you in these first 30 minutes no of course not but if this script was going to be a slow pace as the narrative of this thing then you might as well just go play it for yourself that brings me to one of my biggest changed opinions which we might as well touch on now before it becomes an issue the pacing i mentioned in that opening section that i remember the story having a lot of random plot threads that resolve only a little bit later specifically i used the example of michael always finding some new reason to go on a heist well first off there's more logic to his crimes than i remembered but secondly about halfway through the game i came across this new perspective that helped me enjoy the pacing of this story a lot more see i was looking at this thing as basically being a movie with gameplay well it's more like a tv series with gameplay i'm jumping ahead a bit but i first had this thought after the torture scene this guy is around for about three missions and nothing that happens during those missions advances the plot pretty much at all you get a little character development for trevor during that final mission of this plot line the actual torture part but for the most part this kind of just feels like something included to grab headlines like that thing with horses and cold weather and red dead too i mean it does introduce that the fib and the iaa are at a bit of an invisible war with each other but that's about it for story progression and well we already knew that trevor was anti-establishment this doesn't alleviate the criticism i still believe that the most shocking thing in your story should be more important to the plot as a whole but it was kind of at that point that i realized that this whole thing isn't meant to be taken exclusively as one long story it's more like multiple smaller stories that make up a larger story you've got this episode then you've got the one where trevor kidnaps a cartel leader's wife then you've got the episode where franklin gets into a fight with lamar over disrespecting ogs from his neighborhood and it turns into a huge shootout with apollos or the episode where they have to get ready to rob a bank that's being protected by crooked cops again the larger story does progress at least a bit with each episode but looking at them independently this game's pacing becomes way more palatable this right here is how you make that rockstar trope of your protagonist doing jobs for some new jerk every few missions work hell if this game just had chapter cards it would have made the story structure make so much more sense moving on from that where were we oh yeah we caught a glimpse of what might turn out to be our coveted moral to the story of this thing franklin wants to move forward in life and get with the times but lamar wants to stay right where he is because that's where his friends are i remember this not really leading to much a bit of a thematic dead end but let's see where it goes so we have franklin trying to move on to more sophisticated crimes and michael who to franklin serves as a perfect example that that lifestyle just leads to a lot of regrets and having nobody that you can really call friend where does trevor fit in well if michael represents aggressively moving towards the future at all costs and franklin represents someone who still has a chance to change their mind about that then trevor is someone who refuses to change it all he's like michael's lamar happy where he was and blaming his friends for wanting something more stable man crazy dudes all right i thought y'all get along maybe y'all too much alike though me and him oh hell no man you think hell yeah i think we'll get into all of these characters a bit more as we move forward and i'll give you some more evidence for these character bios but that whole past present and future thing plays into something much broader about grand theft auto 5. this whole thing like previous gta games is incredibly satirical only instead of satirizing american stereotypes like the previous games this one is focused almost completely on one thing the soulless corporatized hellscape that it's hard to pretend that we don't live in i mean hell as i write this i got licked for 250 by a cell company not 20 minutes ago i don't want to sound like that same [ __ ] teenage philosopher that smoked his way through his first couple playthroughs of this game and i don't want to look like some anti-cell phone boomer but through the broad satirical lens of a grand theft auto game it's a pretty accurate summary of where we're headed as a species the future where real human relationships don't matter half as much as imported palm trees and a million followers again i'm not that pessimistic and this game is satirizing this stuff like crazy but that's the perspective that this world is coming from this well this makes the world of grand theft auto 5 itself a pretty good analog for what i was just talking about with these characters michael himself is a part of grand theft auto 5 satire he's a symbol of what franklin might end up becoming and what trevor fights so hard against a sellout a fake person with fake friends fake dreams fake happiness and a fake philosophy on social darwinism so that's pretty much my take on what this game is setting up let's look at some of these characters and the things that happen to them so we can see how well the game follows through on this we'll start with what was one of the first bold print notes i took trevor's story on his way to confront michael and los santos during the car ride into ls trevor starts telling wade a story to get him to shut up he starts out trying to change the names but eventually he gets too passionate to keep that up anyways in the story trevor was an air force pilot in training but after a bad psych evaluation he was discharged and left with nothing he cared about that's when michael who'd been doing stick up jobs for a bit approached him the vulnerable and empty trevor was essentially manipulated by michael into getting excited about this whole robbery thing michael and this life of crime were all that trevor cared about he finally had someone to give his loyalty to again michael and trevor took on a new running mate brad and trevor started to consider brad to be just as good a friend to him as michael was eventually however once their bond had been established michael met a stripper married her and had a couple of kids and he was approached by dave norton of the fib all he had to do was set it up so that he would fake being killed by dave and trevor would be put down for real here's the thing though brad randomly stepped in front of trevor at the perfect time and he wound up taking the bullet michael faked being hit hiding his body armor from trevor and trevor fled the scene thinking that one of his friends had been arrested and the other had been killed when in fact brad died and michael lied what this all boils down to is that michael manipulated some poor vulnerable kid into doing all of these horrible things and when it was time for him to move on he tried to kill him and disappeared from his life for 10 years leaving him to grieve michael stole more from trevor than they had ever stolen from anybody else the last part of the lie was that trevor who wasn't supposed to survive had to be convinced that brad was still alive so that he didn't question why there wasn't a funeral for him as brad was buried in michael's place trevor was sent a ton of fake letters from brat fooled into thinking he was alive and well in prison this all leads to this ticking clock element as soon as trevor realizes that michael's still alive it's just a matter of time until he starts asking questions about brad and realizes that it was all a setup and that one of his best friends sold him out to the feds and got his other best friend killed trevor is definitely the most irredeemable bastard in the whole of grand theft auto i mean he's literally a cannibal but he's had so many awful things happen to him that it's hard not to sympathize with him and all of those awful things they were michael's doing before we move on to michael and how he just continues this cycle of manipulating and using people let's talk about some of the antagonists while he's more of just a punching bag for michael and trevor than an antagonist let's start with laszlo he's this fake as all hell soulless talentless vinewood sellout he represents just about everything that this game hates about modern culture if you want to get conspiratorial about it he's out there every day convincing america that they don't need true connections or meaningful thoughts to be happy to be happy all they need is to be rich in a big city and big on the internet next up we've got steve haynes this lunatic career man who will do everything from torturing innocent civilians working with murderers and crooks commissioning acts of terrorism assassinating philanthropists and killing or arresting all of his associates to cover his own ass and advance his career a bit he says multiple times that he genuinely loves america and is a patriot and i believe him grand theft auto 5's america fits him like a glove thirdly we've got the worst of them all devin weston some hypocritical business mogul who spews all this crap about yoga and liberalism only to turn out to be a social darwinist who owns an 11 share in a private army meriwether he cheats trevor michael lamar and franklin out of their payment for stealing the five one-of-a-kind cars he pulls the rug out from under michael's feet after trying to sell him on his dream of being a film producer he sends a merryweather kill squad to michael's house just out of spite for the accidental death of his assistant and most telling of all when trevor kidnaps devin at the end of the death wish ending and devin is shouting at him from the trunk well just listen all i've ever wanted is to watch you drift in and out of consciousness as your slowly disemboweled yes yes that's the kind of creativity i need on my team come on come on let me out of here not only is he unable to think of any way to calm trevor down other than offering him money but he sees trevor's individuality and immediately starts to think about how he can sell it like i said he's the worst of them all so we've got a vapid sellout a ruthless manipulator and a man who puts money above everything and thinks that the whole world can be bought and sold i uh i know somebody else like that michael all of these descriptions apply to him perfectly he's exactly like all of these antagonists except he also goes postal and guns down civilians from time to time so now with that we see trevor's motivation in the story yes he's trying to expand his underworld businesses yes he's trying to stick it to meriwether and the larger system in general yes he's trying to find love and yes he wants to bust brad out of prison but above anything else trevor wants to help michael quit being such a tool and bring back the old michael who was loyal passionate flawed but human at least in trevor's eyes so now we've got trevor's backstory and motivation and his antagonist michael but with a character so crazy i think it's worth going into exactly how he pursues these goals after all if a character is consistently doing things that don't advance their interests whatsoever that probably isn't very good writing trevor well it's tricky sometimes to pin down why he does the things he does but it ultimately boils down to him hating the establishment and that in a nutshell is why trickle down economics is a load of [ __ ] he wants to tear down well everything i've been talking about so far we've got some more specific character moments though that i think are worth touching on when you completely understand trevor's motivations for something really specific it makes for some really interesting moments one of my favorites says this crazy scene look deborah i love you and i love you too floyd why can't we all just be together huh you can have mondays through thursdays you can have the weekends all right i know that's not normal but in this crazy crazy world is normal so good huh look deborah floyd will you marry me get out of my condo this seems initially like it's just typical crazy trevor but you might remember that the previous mission had trevor taking mrs madrazo back to the mister's house essentially being forced to leave this woman that he loved he's feeling lovesick and so he confesses his love to the next person he sees as soon as he sees them even deborah who he isn't a fan of then however you're not a man at all bob's right about you oh who's bob trevor finds out that deborah has been cheating on floyd and uh he elevates things you people are not very [ __ ] nice this also reminds me of all the other stuff with floyd like okay trevor wanted to rob merryweather so he used floyd to get closer to them got it but how does completely destroying floyd's life ensuring he loses his job and his girlfriend to help with his plan well it's separate he sees floyd as even worse than michael sure michael's a stick in the mud now but floyd's been a stick in the mud his whole life he's got no problem working this depressing ass job and trevor just hates this guy he wants this guy to go really crazy and do something for himself and so he tries to force him to do something for himself by doing this to the apartment and doing this at his work granted the whole mrs madrazo thing is too much of an emotional burden and trevor acts like trevor before he can see his plans come to fruition but he had a real motivation here beyond just being a jerk to this guy he didn't like just as with michael he was trying to force floyd to change his ways and be less vapid trevor is definitely the most complex character in the game so i don't expect us to need to go into this much detail with franklin or michael and hey we already got a good amount of michael's character out of the way but let's start going into a little bit more detail about him so even above being a liar a cheater a thief michael is a hypocrite and his kids are a perfect example of how they aren't really any different from him at least in his current state the apple doesn't fall far from the tree in los santos they've all got broken moral compasses [ __ ] yeah awesome let's rob somebody do it dad yeah do it do it enough okay they're all lazy and looking for the shortcuts in life they're all passionless and lacking any serious motivation but michael talks down about them constantly if you ask me this is just michael looking down on himself projecting he knows he's changed changed into the type of man that raises these two awful kids and hates it as much as trevor does the only difference is that he represses it and if nothing else tries to trick himself into thinking he's happy he doesn't hate these kids he hates himself for raising them so over the course of the plot he's just miserable on every last cut scene except for when he's caught up in some big score when he's channeling his old self then he's hyped up excited and just having a great time it's the only time he isn't repressing his feelings when he's being true to himself the kids would be a complete mess and this man has no business having kids regardless at all but these kids would be a lot better off if it was this guy raising him as opposed to this guy still it's impossible to not feel bad for the guy he did what he had to do to protect his family from himself and ultimately his whole life falls apart his wife is a serial cheater his kids hate him he hasn't been happy in years and now his past is coming back to haunt him that feeling can be set aside though when you see him being the same manipulative bastard that got trevor into robbery in the first place throughout the majority of the plot trevor and even worse franklin get roped into doing all of these suicidally dangerous missions to help michael get out of this bad deal with the fib he might have had franklin's best interest in mind when he started helping him out but it doesn't take too long before he's just another tool to michael he's definitely lost some of who he was back in the day but he was never the man that trevor remembers him as he was always a snake a lying manipulator who couldn't care less about loyalty moving on to franklin well we already know his motivations he's trying to get out of the streets so that he can compete with tanisha his love interests doctor boyfriend that's just one motivation though in general he hates all the underworld capitalist baggage that comes with being the underdog and he's trying to get out of that we already covered this though and franklin is the one with the most significant character arc in the game so let's see where that arc leads to let's see what lessons he learned from michael and trevor and indeed himself over the course of this game right off the bat he starts pretty damn low he's annoyed that he's just doing simple licks for simeon for bad pay and frustrating working conditions his whole life is basically just stealing cars and racing them back to the garage with his annoying friend and co-worker lamar he's filling in for his friend's tow truck gig for no pay lamar screws up a bunch of the repo jobs for him so he doesn't get paid for those either and when he's flipping family rules says that he has to pay a percentage to the ogs his whole life is just him being used to help the bigger fish get their pay and he wants out understandably that's when he meets michael he sees this ex-career criminal who actually made it work for him with the fancy house in an early retirement the american dream michael elevates franklin like crazy he goes from flipping and petty repos to robbing jewelry stores in a matter of weeks but all that this does is increase his frustration with his friends complacency and unprofessionalism here's the thing though franklin is doing some serious work by the time that he and michael rob the jewelry store but the only reason they even took that job was to pay back martin madrasso once you factor in madrazo's pay franklin only gets a six percent cut of the take depending on which crew members you choose about three hundred thousand dollars sure it's more money than he'd ever made flipping but martin made 2.5 million off of this lick and michael made 1.2 mil franklin's too caught up in the excitement to really care this early on but he's getting played even harder than he was before michael's dressing it up as a service but he's taking advantage of him in the exact same way he took advantage of trevor when he was an impressionable kid michael probably doesn't even realize he's doing it he's just excited to see a youth that's more like himself back in the day than the kids that he raised he sees himself in franklin so he's working with him it's just michael's nature to rip off people a good kid why does he help the [ __ ] poor no you look like a good kid franklin is the son he always wanted someone who reminds him of his old self instead of a reminder of how far he's fallen so what is franklin going to follow michael's example and learn to rip people off or is trevor going to show him that you can make money just by working your own ass off well after a whole lot of bickering a whole lot of michael trying to teach him one lesson screw over everybody that you love hurt rob kill indiscriminately and maybe just maybe if you're lucky you become a three-bit gangster and trevor trying to teach him the opposite lesson hey buddy buddy listen lamarr he's your friend right has been for years we'll show him some loyalty okay what you think michael's gonna be loyal to you you can't buy that you can't find it on the street i was michael's best friend and he let me think he was dirt for 10 years you're a cheap gun who he's only just met yeah okay man okay yeah well think about it well franklin and trevor both get roped into a bunch of dangerous and badly paying work for michael michael is really just taking trevor for his loyalty in franklin for his naivete and almost two-thirds through the game all it does is take franklin to this pivotal moment you know what right before i met you i was boosting rise and racing it feels like it come full circle to me come on i'm serious if you hadn't got me fired from my repo job this is exactly the kind of [ __ ] i'll be doing so thanks dawg after all the crap we've been through man you got me right back where i'll be at anyway so he liked to you what you were to me i see your house i think this dude can take me places yeah maybe something like that franklin learns that this whole thing is just one guy manipulating the guy below and he manipulates the next guy down and so on he's never going to get to the top of this pyramid scheme so if you ask me i say it makes the most sense for franklin to not want to be like michael he'd want to be like trevor but that all really depends on the ending you choose so those endings i think every ending makes sense in terms of what franklin's motivations might be but well this is where you get to decide just what lesson franklin learned from these two lunatics killing michael this is a tricky one michael taught franklin almost all of what he knows but at the end of the day he was just doing it for himself first for his ego then for his safety then for his money you could say that michael doesn't deserve a happy ending you could say that this was a live by the sword die by the sword thing michael was only looking after himself throughout the whole game and that might have been the biggest lesson he taught franklin he and michael they were really just using each other and now franklin has one last use for him you man i was your [ __ ] i couldn't stand out your gun any [ __ ] day you [ __ ] you just keep telling yourself that it ain't gonna make you feel any better what this boils down to is that franklin is teaching michael the lesson now he's showing him how trevor felt after north yankton michael was trying to kill trevor his best friend in the world all because he thought of one last use for him his way out and that's exactly what franklin is doing here it's poetic justice really michael is no different from stretch steve haynes devin weston they're all just businessmen no soul franklin though he just completed the cycle he killed his boss and then he calls up lamar and asks to hang out he made crazy money and he stuck with his real friends by killing michael and keeping in touch with lamar franklin finally broke out of that cycle of pyramid scheme [ __ ] he'd been in since the beginning of the game hey lamar it's me homie look i was just calling to see how you was doing dawg maybe we can hang out or something man i know i've been kind of caught up in [ __ ] man but [ __ ] been real crazy homie but it's dealt with now [ __ ] man you know how it is homie you just start running and [ __ ] then all of a sudden your legs give and you just can't run no more anyway man man just hit me dawg we brothers homie all right peace this is bittersweet for sure but i consider it a good ending now for what i consider the bad ending killing trevor it's cold yeah trevor's a monster and any other story him dying would be the best possible outcome but this is grand theft auto and franklin and michael aren't much better i'll just play a couple scenes here because trevor reads right into franklin and puts it better than i could i ain't been nothing but straight and true with you i'm sorry man yeah you have been true to me but the truth ain't what i'm interested in you [ __ ] tuna trevor's right franklin wound up being no different than michael no different than steve haynes or devin wesson or stretch or any of these antagonists he's just using the people close to him and trevor outlived his usefulness just like he did to michael back in the day michael says it best at the ending surviving is winning franklin everything else is [ __ ] fairy tales spun by people afraid to look life in the eye whatever it takes kid survive damn straight franklin he's only 25 years old and he's already become as jaded and broken as michael friends family loyalty love that's all [ __ ] compared to survival the death wish ending is of course my favorite death wish has the boys setting up an ambush to take down everybody who's trying to kill them after that they all split up and take down stretch steve haynes devin weston and wei shang this is if you ask me franklin taking a page out of trevor's book and sticking by his crew no matter what and ultimately they put aside their differences and solve this thing what's so cool about this from a writing perspective is that the crew gets together one last time and takes down every single antagonist and it reinforces this camaraderie through the simple fact that everyone takes out someone else's antagonist trevor takes down steve haynes who was bothering michael michael takes down stretch who was bothering franklin and franklin takes down wei sheng who was bothering trevor they're all helping each other with their problems not working for themselves but working as an honest-to-god team then they all work together to take down the biggest bastard of them all devin weston who screwed over all of them before ducking out of the robbery game and returning their lives rich enough to retire should they want to this is like franklin and trevor giving michael a do-over he wanted out of the life of a career criminal and now he gets to do it the right way with a handshake rather than backstabbing it's trevor getting a chance to batch things out with michael and finally call him a friend again and it's franklin proving to the people who tried to manipulate him steve haynes and devin weston that he's his own man and he's willing to put his friends above anything else he's willing to risk sacrificing himself to not turn out like michael was at the start of the game it's a fantastic ending to a fantastic story are there distractions from this message sure all of the anti-government stuff in the torture mission is mostly irrelevant to these points the random jokes about the o'neill's linear family tree doesn't have anything to do with it the stuff with the way shang triad doesn't have much to do with it the stupid names of the vehicles the crazy advertisements on the radio there's a ton of this stuff but well all of the stuff i've been focusing on so far about this new dispassionate society replacing the old ways of doing things well it might be the most concrete idea that the game is trying to get across but it's all there to serve one purpose the same purpose as the triad the jokes about the o'neills the anti-government stuff the annoying voice lines of every random citizen the radio ads the brand names the middle finger on your cursor in your web browser it's all there to give you a target for what grand theft auto has always been about grand theft auto 5 is a fantastic story sure it has plot holes sure the characters are occasionally a bit inconsistent sure the satire can be creating at times but a game's story is only there to motivate you to feel and do the things that the game designers want you to and in this case it achieves that perfectly this game is about fighting back against this soulless corporatized world are being consumed by it it's about tearing down all the things that make characters like trevor franklin and michael want to go postal every single thing in this game whether it's the story or the characters or the gameplay or the civilian chatter or the advertisements all of it's about making you want to do one thing burn this city to the ground and piss on its ashes listen amanda we're going to move to los santos start over i made a deal the slate will be totally wiped clean trust me darling look at me amanda it was the only thing i could do either everyone dies or one guy gets out i'm that guy his name is dave norton nice guy realist he gets the glory i get out it's not even a decision amanda i don't have a choice do you want to die here where it's always snowing or do you want to go and live where it's always sunny all right tell me [Music] before i close out this week's video and go try and find out what else i've missed from rockstars library i'd like to verbally thank my patrons especially those donating 10 or more monthly such as alex van der wude almost dead again anatoly volnov andrew melnick arthur d gonzalez martin benny big time jim bobby blitz colin gajek cosmo borski daniel chrisman darius fazier david kaiser dr mein dominic johann duncan bristow fralem in bloom jack eisenberg jano john strange kale graybill mello mixer rules money and muses moon patio furniture perks 3d ceelo yemen she young master pig and zyrable i gotta say i'm really happy with this week's video switching my upload schedule to fridays meant that i had a little bit more time than usual to work on this video which means i'm way ahead of schedule for the first time in months and i think i forgot just how much being ahead of schedule helps my creative process it's the same amount of work as always but my head's just so much more clear and it's just such a healthier work environment and i think if i keep it up like this i can keep on pushing out videos that i really like as opposed to stuff that i think is just fine which i've been doing lately so hey maybe this is a change in the weather thanks guys
Info
Channel: Leadhead
Views: 1,390,326
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: grand, theft, auto, story, good, best, ending, explained, analysis, meaning, narrative, plot, franklin, michael, trevor, character, arc, satire, meta, essay
Id: 6dne-o0SoT8
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 35min 16sec (2116 seconds)
Published: Fri Feb 19 2021
Related Videos
Note
Please note that this website is currently a work in progress! Lots of interesting data and statistics to come.